Most handheld scanners used for acquiring information from printed media are directed to general purpose uses, so that they can read and store a variety of different types of printed information designed for various applications. Recent developments directed to these general purpose scanners concern themselves with eliminating distortion before sending images for processing on other devices. Because of storage requirements of images, most scanners utilize plug-in modules to store images, or are limited to small numbers of images before transmission is necessary. This invention is directed to a more special-purpose type of scanner system which comprises the combination of a handheld scanner and associated software communications agent. The scanner is capable of scanning a single line of text and presenting that text to an onboard OCR engine, allowing user display and verification before information is sent to the companion software communications agent. One specific application of the present invention is the scanning of the printed address, or other identification, of a site that is accessible via a communications network such as the internet, and subsequent connection of a communications device to that site. To this end, the invention relates to a method of scanning, verification, storage and transmission of textual data to a companion software communications agent for the utilization of scanned data for connection to a site identified by the textual data. Specifically the invention relates to a system comprising the unique combination of scanner, optical character recognition technology, liquid crystal display and wireless infrared transmission embodied in a handheld apparatus for the purpose of scanning one line of textual information, processing the scanned information with OCR technology and immediately displaying the information to the LCD panel for user verification. This handheld scanner/OCR apparatus allows the verified text to be transmitted to the companion software communications agent on a personal computer (PC) or network computer (NC) which communicates via the internet, e.g. through a browser program, for the retrieval of HTML or VRML documents, or other such information.